Artists Take on Space and Sound at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation
Date Posted: October 31, 2019
Posted In: News, Organizations,
From The Architect’s Newspaper: St. Louis, Missouri, is having a cultural moment. Architecture-related arts projects abound, meaning artists are taking serious note of how structure and spaces might inspire their work.
In the Pulitzer Arts Foundation’s Tadao Ando-designed building, Turner Prize-winning Scottish artist Susan Philipsz has responded to the building itself. Commissioned for the Foundation’s water court, Too Much I Once Lamented, 2019 features five speakers playing the artist’s sung rendition of a 1622 ballad by composter Thomas Tomkins. It’s a response to the acoustics found in the space’s hard and liquid surfaces. Philipsz, who specializes in sound installations that transform space into “immersive environments of architecture and song,” utilized reflection and projection for this site-specific work.
Also on display at the Foundation is Zarina: Atlas of Her World, created by the Indian-American artist Zarina who wanted to be an architect but instead studied mathematics and printmaking. Now 82-years old, she draws inspiration from her childhood during and after Partition, the 1947 division of British India into the independent states of India and Pakistan. The idea of displacement and the notion of home, together with her interest in modernism, abstraction, and geometry, can be seen in Home Is a Foreign Place (1999). In this piece, Zarina features 36 woodcuts that each evoke architectural spaces (Threshold, Door, and Courtyard).
A grid of arches in Zarina’s Shadow House I, 2008 recalls domestic spaces and jalis, the ubiquitous Indian architectural stone screens. Pool II, 1980, a paper sculpture, “hints at the architecture of her homeland, including courtyards, arches, and stepwells.” Delhi, 2000 is a three-part work showing the city in plan and section.